He Walks Among Us
He Walks Among Us
Not Distant, Not Indifferent: The God Who Came Near
He Walks Among Us
John 1:14–18 — and the kind of God we never could have invented.
My daughters have been blasting the Epic musical — the album based on Homer's Odyssey — at full volume for weeks now. Every day is a concert. It got me back into the Iliad, and I landed on one of the most haunting moments in ancient literature. Achilles, watching King Priam grieve over his dead son, says it like this: "The gods have spun for miserable mortals a life of sorrow. They themselves live free from care."
That's one ancient picture of God. Powerful and bored. Detached from the misery they help create. Across the sea in Mesopotamia, you'd hear another. In the Enuma Elish, the god Marduk explains why he made human beings: "I will create primeval man on whom the toil of the gods will be laid that they may rest." You're a slave so the divine can have its weekends back. And then there's our modern myth — Richard Dawkins, in River Out of Eden, writing that the universe is exactly what you'd expect "if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference." You're a stack of chemical reactions, and when you stop reacting, that's it.
Now imagine you grew up inside one of those three stories — bored gods, tyrant gods, or no god at all. Then someone hands you a scroll and you read John 1:14: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth."
The shock should knock you over. The Word — the spark John has been writing about, the eternal logic that started the universe — didn't sit on a cloud and roll dice with our lives. He took on flesh. He moved in. The Greek verb John uses for dwelt is the verb form of tabernacle — the same tent God told Israel to build in the wilderness so He could move with them. God didn't watch our suffering from a distance. He pitched His tent among us.
And here's the part John wants us to feel: this isn't a plot twist. This is who God has always been. He freed Israel from slavery in Egypt, and the first thing He had them build was a tabernacle, to travel with them through the desert. He came down on Mount Sinai to share His personal name. And when Moses, standing on that mountain, dared to pray, "Lord, please show me your glory," God answered — Exodus 34:6–7, the verse the Hebrew Scriptures quote more than any other. It's the John 3:16 of the Old Testament: "Yahweh, Yahweh, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness."
But Moses didn't see God's face. Not yet. That's where John 1:18 lands like a thunderclap: "No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is at the Father's side, He has made Him known." The Greek for "made Him known" is exēgeomai — to exegete, to draw out, to interpret. Jesus is the exegesis of God.
That matters because we are constantly tempted to do the opposite — to eisegete God, to read into Him whatever we want Him to be. If it were up to me, I'd assemble a giant teddy-bear God who hugs me and never challenges anything I plan to do. But the incarnation says: stop inventing Him. Look at Jesus. The carpenter from Nazareth who walked the shores of Galilee, who wept, who pushed back, who forgave, who refused to flinch at the cross — that face is the clearest picture of God humanity has ever received.
I came to faith through this exact realization. My parents divorced when I was small, and the disequilibrium of growing up between two homes drove me, by fifth grade, into an existential tailspin. I started collecting books on every world religion I could find — Buddhism, Islam, Christianity — because I needed something true to stand on. Without the words for it then, I was praying Moses' prayer: God, show me your glory. And it was the face of Jesus that finally answered.
So here's the invitation this week, and it's almost embarrassingly simple. Spend some time staring at the face of Jesus. As we walk through the Gospel of John this season, pick up any of the four Gospels and just sit with the man. Read a chapter. Watch how He treats women, children, the sick, the cynical. Notice what He says — and what He doesn't say. Then ask: does the Jesus on this page look anything like the God I keep assembling in my head?
It's the same question I've started asking the people I love who are still searching. Forget the philosophical heavy lifting for a minute. Just look at Him. Because if John is right — if Jesus is the exegesis of God — then nothing we do this week will matter more than that.
The Big Bang didn't stay distant. He pitched His tent here. And He's still inviting us in.
